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SEMINAR: UWA Music presents: Callaway Centre Seminar Series | Nicholas Bannan

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Today's date is Friday, March 29, 2024
UWA Music presents: Callaway Centre Seminar Series | Nicholas Bannan : Did the voices of men and women evolve to sing in harmony? Other events...
A free weekly seminar series, with presenters from within UWA and from the wider community.

Since Darwin, evolutionary explanations of the role of vocal communication in the development of human cultural universals have received fluctuating levels of attention. While during the early 20th Century ethnomusicologists such as Sachs and von Hornbostel sustained an interest in the distribution of musicality as an inseparable feature of the human condition, little progress was made for more than a century after Darwin in examining the material evidence for musical origins. A key feature of this from an animal behaviour perspective – especially in terms of the application of Darwin’s sexual selection model to human musicality – is the gendered nature of the anatomy that permits us to engage in music. Comparisons across species indicate considerable sexual dimorphism in terms of such features as: range; role; interaction; and purpose. Humans, like Pied Butcher Birds, have equal and complementary capacities for musical generativity and participation, with a clearly superior role for the female in employing music in child-rearing. Studies in linguistics have remarked on the assumed universal whereby the vocal ranges of human adult males and females lie on average exactly an octave apart: a feature plainly evident in cultural practice. Yet an explanation for this in the voice and music literature is strangely absent. This paper reports on the initiation of a research project aiming to address this lacuna in the research landscape, and to set out some of the definitions and other factors that need require consideration.

Further information at music.uwa.edu.au
Speaker(s) Nicholas Bannan
Location Tunley Lecture Theatre
Contact UWA Music <[email protected] > : 6488 7836
Start Tue, 30 Apr 2019 17:00
End Tue, 30 Apr 2019 18:15
Submitted by UWA Music <[email protected] >
Last Updated Mon, 29 Apr 2019 11:36
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